Travel

In This Episode: There’s a proven way to boost your creativity, open-mindedness, thoughtfulness, and more. The best part: it’s also fun, interesting, and can even be done while working, or on vacation.

I’ve mentioned here and there that my wife, Kit, is walking the Camino de Santiago — the “French Way,” starting in Saint Jean De Pied De Port, France, over the French Pyrenees to Pamplona, Spain, and then west to Santiago. The trek is about 800km, or around 500 miles. Plus any walking around to get dinner or … Continue Reading

Last week my wife and I went driving to see the fall colors. I thought you’d like to see what the trees look like in the Colorado mountains at about the time the first snow dusts the top of the San Juan mountains.

On Saturday my wife and I had the opportunity to “have dinner with” the first man to set foot on the moon, Neil Armstrong. It happened to be almost exactly* 43 years after that spectacular event. Like many kids who grew up in the 60s and watched that history being made, Armstrong was a hero to me, so when I got the opportunity to do this, I of course leapt at it.

This is being written in an unusual location. Not my office, not home, not even sitting in the passenger seat while Kit drives. Someone else is driving on our trip to Reno for the Mensa “Annual Gathering” (read: national convention), where Kit and I are speaking. We’re on the California Zephyr — a train (yeah, in the United States!)

I live in one of the most beautiful parts of one of the most beautiful states in the union. If you’ve been following this blog, you know I work a lot, and know I stare out at the mountains from my office window — I have a great view.

I mentioned in my post last week that being in Washington D.C. was “more surreal than usual” because it was election time. Well, imagine being inside the White House just two days before the election! Because indeed, that’s where I was.

I had a pretty full weekend — I’m writing this while sitting in the airport, waiting for my plane to get me the rest of the way home. I had a very interesting trip to Washington D.C.; election time makes the town even more surreal than usual. My report next week will get into that a little bit more.

Last week I spoke at yet another Mensa “gathering” (convention), this one a regional affair hosted by the Northern Nevada chapter. I happen to know several Mensans in Nevada: some are readers, several are relatives of good friends here in Colorado. They really begged and pleaded for me to come and talk at the first Regional Gathering they were doing, and I finally relented.

Ten years ago this week I wrote two full columns: the regular one, and one on the breaking scandal with President Bill “I Did Not Have Sex With That Woman” Clinton. I (and many others) dubbed it Fornigate, and it led to his impeachment.

There is only one more thing I want to cover about the trip before I wrap up this section of my blog and move on to regular business. That is, the part that made this such a memorable trip, otherwise known as the answer to the question all my friends have been asking me since we got back: “What’s the most outstanding memory, or biggest highlight, from the trip?”

When discussing the Three Gorges Dam project, the Chinese guides loved to spout numbers. (27.15 million cubic meters of cement. 281,000 tons of metal structures plus 354,000 tons of reinforcing bars. 365 townships in Sichuan and Hubei provinces have been or will be inundated — a total of 632 sq. km. Etc.) What I found more interesting was the human factor.

I’m back after being offline for several days while cruising down the Yangtze on a riverboat (more on that in a few days). Meanwhile, a few observations on some things the Chinese are really doing right, healthcare-wise.

A previous post mentioned Hong Kong’s terrible smog (a word the Chinese don’t seem to know, but they understand “air pollution.” Another reader says there’s another term for it that’s spreading like the smog: the “Asian Brown Cloud“).

Kit (and quite a few other hospitality consultants) and I took the jet ferry from Hong Kong to Macao, another “special administrative region” of China. As Hong Kong used to be a territory of the U.K., Macao was run by Portugal (for over 400 years), and it was also handed back over to China (in 1999; Hong Kong was handed back in 1997).

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